Why Saying “I'm Sorry” Isn't Good Enough: The Ethics of Corporate ...

Ethics Corporate Apologies
corporate public apology. Instead of simply applying general ethical theory to the
apology, this paper looks for norms in the communicative act itself. I argue that corporate
apologies differ in some significant ways from both private, personal apologies and
collective, nation-state apologies and that these differences should be considered when
evaluating the ethics of corporate apologies.
Second, I identify and briefly explored the largely ignored roles played by what I call
“role contamination”, by context, and by the speaker’s ethos and audience pathos in
ethically good apologies. The management, legal, and psychological literature has tended
to focus on compensation to victims or acknowledgement of norm violations (Fehr et al,
2010) and to overlook the important ethical dimension imbedded in the full rhetorical
context of corporate apologies. For example, although the CEO’s acceptance of his or her
firm’s responsibility for harm in an apology is surely important (Kador, 2009), such
acceptance by itself does not suffice to make a CEO’s apology ethically good. The tone
and formality of an apology matter, as does the setting for the apology. All of these
factors influence what the recipients of an apology hear and thus whether they will have a
good reason to treat the apology as, in principle, trustworthy. So CEOs need to consider
such elements when constructing their apologies.
The paper concludes with some reasons why it may not be possible to specify all
elements of an effective apology. The actual audience reception of a given apology is a
highly contingent matter. Ethicists should concentrate, therefore, on what makes a
proffered apology, in principle, trustworthy instead of on apology efficacy with a given
audience. This issue is one on which ethicists can make significant contributions, given
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